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I'd like to suggest that we try and come up with a policy about mis-spelling redirects (instead of arguing each one out separately).
My position is that for any word, there are a multitude of potential mis-spellings, and I see no reason preferentially treat one misspelling (which someone has accidentally created on Wikipedia) over all the others (which haven't been).
Not that I have a blanket rule against variant spelling links, as you can see from Thutmose (which you can find explained here).
I feel that if you happen to have some evidence that a particular misspelling is a common mis-spelling, or alternatively that it's an alternative spelling which is in non-trivial use, then that's an OK reason to keep it. If nothing else, it will prevent someone from creating duplicate content when they think something "isn't there".
However, the bulk of mis-spellings come from a dropped, or typoed character (e.g. "entaglement" or "entanglrment" for "entaglement"), and I think those should be delete without debate.
Noel 16:29, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I agree with you here - 'common' misspellings are good redirects, 'random' misspellings just clutter up the database. Which of course leaves the question of which are 'common' and which 'random'. Andre Engels 10:01, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Right ;)
As long as we don't have another tool, I'm not quite sure what we'd use instead. BTW there is a project to expand these redirects further, see User:Daniel_Quinlan/redirects.
We could build a List of redirects of misspelings similar to Wikipedia:Links_to_disambiguating_pages and generate a list like Wikipedia:Disambiguation_pages_with_links. This way the redirects will be put to some use. -- User:Docu
What does this mean, "clutter up the database"? When Wikipedia is slow, it's not because of large redirects. If a misspelling redirect exists, then that is prima facie evidence that the word is ; it may be mispelt again. We all have better things to do than to delete things that do no harm and clearly do a slight amount of good. This is why it's been Wikipedia policy from the beginning (or at least since I arrived in 2002) to not delete mispelt redirects, and a good policy it is too. -- Toby Bartels 01:22, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I propose deletion of redirects created by random spelling errors. Jay 08:19, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I think the best solution here is a technological one. The software should make available to us the number of requests made for pages with a given title (regardless of whether or not the page exists). Then we can evaluate the creation or maintainance of misspelling redirects based directly on how often they are requested by readers. This would also be handy for identifying "high-profile" articles - ones that we have to watch the content of carefully to avoid creating a bad impression.
Derrick Coetzee 01:17, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I also think it would be reasonable to perform a simple search, such as that done by spell-checkers, through the article names for very close alternatives when there is no match. This would eliminate the need to create many of these redirects manually, including many of the less frequent ones.
Derrick Coetzee 01:27, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I disagree strongly with the notion that redirects that are uncommon mispellings should be deleted. Why?
By its very nature, RfD doesn't get a lot of traffic. Most vandals aren't clever enough to redirect Amazingly fat and stupid dog-faced fart-sniffer to the article on their least favorite person in the world. Let's accept the fact that there's not a whole lot for us to do on RfD, and stop trying to make more work for ourselves. • Benc • 08:14, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Am I right in thinking that a REDIRECT is simply an article which begins #REDIRECT [[somewhere else]] and that any further content is ignored? If so, why not simply add some sort of explanation to a REDIRECT? You could then have something like:
Coblers #REDIRECT [[Cobblers]] Common mis-spelling
which would then show up on a search. HTH HAND -- Phil 09:26, Mar 11, 2004 (UTC)
You mean something like Mediawiki:RedirectAlternateSpelling which could read something like "this is an alternate spelling: do not delete"? -- Phil | Talk 15:47, Mar 12, 2004 (UTC)
I would like to have a policy on the deletion of redirects to nonexistent articles. Some are leftovers from deleted articles, some are redirects made from a template, and some are just the usual bits of anarchism.
In some situations, the redirect and the nonexistent article have similar titles. When one or both of the pages are created at some point in the future, there will be a discussion of if the two are the same thing (and if they're the same, which should hold the article and which should be the redirect). It seems unfair to bias that discussion against the page currently redirecting before either article has been created.
As such, I recommend that all redirects to nonexistent pages be deleted, unless the redirect page has links to it and there already exist a scheme for that redirection (e.g. 2004 Canadian election -> Canadian federal election, 2004 and 1878 Canadian election-> Canadian federal election, 1878). -- Ben Brockert 23:17, May 3, 2004 (UTC)
Shoud archive the debates, and, if yes, where should we keep them? As there isn't just that much we could just create archive pages /Archive1 etc. -- User:Docu
Folks, we have about 90 redirects of the form '"article_name"' - that is, the name of an existing article surrounded by double quotes. Examples include "Desolation_Row", "list_of_slovakian_companies" and "All_My_Trials". I'd like to take a reasonably aggressive approach and delete these where:
I wanted to give folks a few days to think on this and object/comment/offer assistance before I go ahead. - TB 15:47, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
Somebody suggested that the software should provide information on how often a page is accessed, but I think that might have privacy implications and is a bad idea. [originally unsigned by 66.32.123.183 08:47, 16 Aug 2004 ]
Please see User_talk:Sam_Spade#ha ha. User:Zanimum appears to have deleted my Gnome Chompy redirect out of process. Some assistance, please. Sam [ Spade] 10:40, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The point was made to me (and after thinking about it, I concurred) that redirects which are "placeholders" for articles we need, and which are temporarily set to the closest reasonable match (e.g. Sultan of the Ottoman Empire -> Ottoman Empire) should in fact be deleted. That way, we make sure that references to the non-existent article show up in red, so that people know we need to create the page.
It has been suggested that we add this point to the list at WP:RfD#When_should_we_delete_a_redirect, and I think that's a good idea. I'm going to do that "shortly", unless someone has a cogent reason not to (or they have a better reason than the one above as to why we should leave such links :-). Noel 13:47, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The person who deleted that clause cited Wikipedia:Redirects with possibilities as the reason for doing so. I personally don't find the existence of this page a persuasive argument. It's an obscure page, and I doubt most people know about it. Are there really many people who go there, looking for things they have expertise on, that they can write about? And how many topics listed there are not in the expertise of people who do know about it? I think it's much more likely that people stumble across missing articles in the course of their everyday movements around the 'Pedia, and do articles then (just as I did yesterday with DKM Deutschland). So I think the argument that it's better to have red links as a way to get articles written is very persuasive.
Also, if a reader sees a red link, and they want to know more anyway, there's always the "Search" button, so I think the disadvantages of leaving such "close but no cigar" links in place (which is that the article may never get written) far outweighs the advantages (you save somsone having to go use Search). Noel (talk) 00:40, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Sometimes an article is written under an obscure name, and a more appropriately-named page is made a redirect. For example, Group 15 element is a redirect to Pnictogen. The former name is rather unwieldly, but the latter is etymologically questionable (see the article) and not approved by the relevant international standards organization. I want to interchange the article and the redirect, but this requires the redirect to be deleted. Is there a policy on these situations? -- Smack 00:59, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Now that WP:RM seems to be up and running, do we want to alter the header here to refer people to that page for all redirect deletes which are actually for moves? Noel (talk) 00:34, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
There's a possible idea for a bot for adding "missing" redirects that I've added to the Bots page. Since any bad redirects would end up on WP:RFD, I'd really like to get input from you folks on whether it's a worthwhile idea or not. Note also that many of the suggested redirects would be pluralisations (I've heard Noel speak in favour of adding these, and I strongly agree that plurals often make great redirects). All the best, -- Nickj 09:13, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
OK, the idea of automatically adding these by bot is dropped, but the lists have been recreated and tidied up, and placed on this Missing Redirects page, together with instructions. The lists are broken up into blocks of 5 suggestions, so that they are not overwhelming, and so that people can do as much or as little as they like. Additionally, I've added an "Easy Preview" function, so that these can be added in 2 mouse clicks, without typing or copying/pasting anything at all. Hopefully this should provide a good solution of software doing the laborious searching, with humans deciding whether the suggestions are any good or not. All the best, -- Nickj 06:09, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Some of our "reasons to delete/keep" list might need some tweaks. For the "delete" list, my eye catches the following:
Guidelines for redirects says: we try to make sure that all "inbound redirects" are mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs of the article; I'd like to include some sort of reference to this on RfD, and this seems like the right place for it.
This instruction seems to be inconsistent with contemporary practise in many well-accepted cases, e.g. Admin, which redirects to Wikipedia:Administrators, not to mention RfD, which redirect here! See also Talk:VfD and Talk:Vfd, where discussion explicitly is in favour of keeping VfD as a redir to WP:VfD. I don't understand what the dividing line is between x-space redirs to Wikipedia: that we keep, and those we ditch - is it only the most notable ones, or what?
On the "keep" side:
I'd like to expand this to include other forms of speech (e.g. verb tenses and participles, etc); Translating → Translation - is an example.
Do people have any command and/or suggested wordings? Thanks! Noel (talk) 13:34, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
See "When should we delete a redirect?" Wikipedia:Redirect lists a similar list by the same name, but with some minor differences, e.g. Charles/Daniel instead of Adam/Andrew. Is this duplication intentional? Is it a problem? If so, which page should hold the authoritative text? Just wondering. -- Wisq 21:58, 2005 Feb 9 (UTC)
Judging from the HTML comment, someone really wanted to keep the word "automagically" on this page. I removed it because A. The Jargon File article to which the word links contains no mention of the word "automagically"; and B. The Jargon File site itself [4] is not very user-friendly when it comes to looking up individual definitions. So I'm not sure of the point of including the word as a link to Jargon file when the target article is not really helpful.
If that person is still really attached to leaving the term "automagically" on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion, then I suggest either A. Linking the word directly to the external jargon file definition like so: Automagically, or B. just put the word in quotes. I think having the word here is silly, which is why I removed it rather than doing one of the above two things. Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 15:23, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
There are two kinds of redirect pages I think should be deleted, but they are not mentioned in the list:
The term
biped forms - like most English words - the plural by adding "s". Someone (who presumably wasn't aware we can create links like "[[biped]]s") created a page
bipeds. This page was listed on
User:Nickj/Redirects/redirects-066.txt as requiring attention. To avoid this sort of distraction, wouldn't it be good if we deleted all such pages?
Sebastian 05:45, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)
The page
aggridant redirects to
Abraham Maslow, who coined the term and was apparently the only significant person to ever use it. The term is not discussed on that page. It was briefly mentioned, but not really defined, there temporarily, but that mention got deleted on January 1, 2005. Obviously, since its creatin in 2003 nobody felt that this article was worth even a definition of the term. I think it would be better to delete such redirects, because they mislead readers.
Sebastian 05:45, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)
The GFDL requires Wikipedia to credit authors. Wikipedia does this by preserving the history of articles. But it cannot do this if the article is deleted. What sometines happens is that articles are merged, and one is turned into a redirect to the other. That is fine, though the edit summary on the new longer article should say that is what has happened. The problem comes if the redirect is then deleted, because the history of the source of some of the information is lost. -- Henrygb 21:25, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
We recently came across some very strangely named articles on WP:VFD (one with a 200-char title, another with ellipsis in it). Would it be useful to do some automated searches on cases like these, and nominate them here as inappropriate?
Radiant _* 14:27, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)
I've reverted an apparently un-discussed change to case #6 of "when should we delete a redirect", as well as minor changes to a number of other parts of the policy. The old version (now restored) was:
Michael Hardy's version is
Was there a discussion of this I somehow missed? -- Carnildo 04:58, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
In view of the list of exceptions in the paragraph beginning with "However...", I've revised item 6 in a way that is really just a changed in emphasis and I hope will avoid some rash deletions-without-due-deliberation. It now reads as follows:
Michael Hardy 03:40, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Here's the quote from Wikipedia:Redirects_for_deletion:
....
That's been there all along. Michael Hardy 00:49, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
And you have been saying that redirects from plurals and alternative spellings to singulars or more standard or less confusing or otherwise better spellings should be considered "broken" unless the target page already exists. Obviously a redirect from an incorrect spelling or a misnomer or a plural to a correct article title, which does not yet exist, can avoid later creation of duplicate articles! And that's what that long-standing policy says: we should not speedily delete a redirect to a non-existent target if it may help avoid later inadvertent creation of duplicate articles. Why are you so stronly opposed to such a simple precaution against inadvertent creation of duplicate articles, whose authors cannot work together because they are unaware of each other? Michael Hardy 02:45, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I keep getting asked about these, so I'm going to post this here for general interest. (Like I have said several times, policy at the moment is to keep them, but I wouldn't mind seeing this changed, and these old names deleted, but I'm happy to keep them too.)
I wasn't around for the "keep sub-page redirects" discussion, it was before my time; it happened back when they decided to get rid of sub-pages. I added keep #7 when I was told of the policy by some other admins (when a case came up - I think it may have been Cambodia sub-pages, IIRC). I spent some time researching where the relevant policy is, and also spent a while looking for discussion about redirects at the location of old sub-pages.
You can find the policy at Wikipedia:Redirect#Renamings and merges. That text was added in this series of edits by User:MyRedDice, back in the summer of 2003.
Although I found a lot of debate about sub-pages, and some about keeping redirects to pages that were moved, I didn't find much specifically about the keeping of redirects to subpages. (It may have been discussed as part of a discussion on RfD about a specific entry, but if so I don't know which one; I looked in WP:Rfd/Precedents and didn't see anything.) There was general discussion of keeping URL's which used to work for a page continue to work, so that links to Wikipedia pages stored off-site continue to work, and that seems to have been applied to sub-pages.
PS: Here's the removal of the case which prompted me to add that entry to the keep list. Note that there's no discussion of the policy here; both of us just seem to accept it. Noel (talk) 14:07, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
For those interested in this history of how sub-pages were eventually discarded as an organizational scheme (which happened around the start of 2002, as best I can make out), see this page. If anyone knows of a better reference on the topic, please add it. Noel (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
In the list I found an interesting item: Ted Koppel (alum), which redirects to Ted Koppel, always has, and is not linked to from anywhere but here. In other words, it's a nonsensical redirect because nobody on Earth is going to try to look up Ted Koppel (alum) instead of just going to Ted Koppel. Is it permissible to speedy when there is absolutely no reason whatever for this kind of "disambiguation"? - furrykef ( Talk at me) 08:18, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've been seeing a lot of instances recently where people turn articles into redirects, and promptly list the redirects here. To me, this feels like an end-run around the way we normally delete content pages through the VfD process. Unless someone objects, I propose to modify the instructions here to say that in such cases, the original content will be restored, and the request removed from RfD, without further notice. Noel (talk) 04:00, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
CamelCase redirects have been the subject of debate as to whether or not we should continue to keep them. This poll is an attempt to see if we should change the current policy for dealing with them.
CamelCase redirects are a relic of the early days of Wikipedia, when CamelCase the only syntax whereby links from one article to another could be done (see Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia for more). For single-word article titles, capitalization of the last character was the standard arrived at. Support of the Free Link syntax for links ([[target article]]) only arrived in February 2001, and articles were rapidly renamed from CamelCase names to regular names, leaving redirects behind.
The current policy (see WP:RfD#Keep #4) is to keep them (to prevent links, bookmarks, etc to them outside Wikipedia working). You can see more about how (and why) that came to be at #Sub-page redirects above (sub-page and CamelCase redirects were dealt with in the same way, so all comments applying to one apply to the other); Talk:ModulE also contains a discussion of the issue. Noel 16:36, 27 July 2005
OK, this has been running for about 3 weeks now - long enough to get a sense of the community - which is that the community is pretty evenly split (it's 11-11 at this point in time) on whether to keep them or delete them. Since there's no consensus to delete, they stay. Noel (talk) 02:06, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Stub templates redirects to Wikipedia namespace, but it saves people from typing a lot of text. Delete or keep? — Stevey7788 ( talk) 21:19, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
By the above poll, it seems obvious there is no consensus for automatically keeping any CamelcAse redirects simply because they're historical. This doesn't mean that they should all be deleted, but at least they should be judged on their own merits. R adiant _>|< 10:07, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
I started the poll (sorry for not signing to make it clear that I did it, I have fixed that) in the common meaning "a mechanism to gauge community feeling" - i.e. to see whether people agreed with the policy, or not. It is not a vote. In retrospect, it could have been slightly better organized (with a "case-by-case decision" section), but since this was really just an attempt to figure out if there was fairly good community consensus behind any particular approach, it's good enough; one can read the comments and get a sense of what the community wants. Noel (talk) 15:07, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
I was the newbie who thought, when looking for my home country, and seeing FinlanD first in the list of suggested pages: "This looks so stupid - can't anything be done about a typo like that?" Only after finding out what CamelCase really was, did I understand. So, a question: Is there any way to automatically remove CamelCase from the search results, not the actual articles or redirects? For instance, should redirects be included in search result at all? (Still relatively newbie, I suspect that may be a dumb question, so please don't snarl... ;-) -- Janke | Talk 14:27, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
{{ WP:RFD}}
Why is this page backwards? Just about every other process page lists new entries on top. R adiant _>|< 13:11, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
Exactly why do we delete non-English redirectors, as they seem to be a perfectly valid navigation aid. IT also allows people to find things if they don't know the proper English term for something they know in the subject's primary language, or in their own mother-tongue. 132.205.45.110 19:07, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
I'd like to suggest that we try and come up with a policy about mis-spelling redirects (instead of arguing each one out separately).
My position is that for any word, there are a multitude of potential mis-spellings, and I see no reason preferentially treat one misspelling (which someone has accidentally created on Wikipedia) over all the others (which haven't been).
Not that I have a blanket rule against variant spelling links, as you can see from Thutmose (which you can find explained here).
I feel that if you happen to have some evidence that a particular misspelling is a common mis-spelling, or alternatively that it's an alternative spelling which is in non-trivial use, then that's an OK reason to keep it. If nothing else, it will prevent someone from creating duplicate content when they think something "isn't there".
However, the bulk of mis-spellings come from a dropped, or typoed character (e.g. "entaglement" or "entanglrment" for "entaglement"), and I think those should be delete without debate.
Noel 16:29, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I agree with you here - 'common' misspellings are good redirects, 'random' misspellings just clutter up the database. Which of course leaves the question of which are 'common' and which 'random'. Andre Engels 10:01, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Right ;)
As long as we don't have another tool, I'm not quite sure what we'd use instead. BTW there is a project to expand these redirects further, see User:Daniel_Quinlan/redirects.
We could build a List of redirects of misspelings similar to Wikipedia:Links_to_disambiguating_pages and generate a list like Wikipedia:Disambiguation_pages_with_links. This way the redirects will be put to some use. -- User:Docu
What does this mean, "clutter up the database"? When Wikipedia is slow, it's not because of large redirects. If a misspelling redirect exists, then that is prima facie evidence that the word is ; it may be mispelt again. We all have better things to do than to delete things that do no harm and clearly do a slight amount of good. This is why it's been Wikipedia policy from the beginning (or at least since I arrived in 2002) to not delete mispelt redirects, and a good policy it is too. -- Toby Bartels 01:22, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I propose deletion of redirects created by random spelling errors. Jay 08:19, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I think the best solution here is a technological one. The software should make available to us the number of requests made for pages with a given title (regardless of whether or not the page exists). Then we can evaluate the creation or maintainance of misspelling redirects based directly on how often they are requested by readers. This would also be handy for identifying "high-profile" articles - ones that we have to watch the content of carefully to avoid creating a bad impression.
Derrick Coetzee 01:17, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I also think it would be reasonable to perform a simple search, such as that done by spell-checkers, through the article names for very close alternatives when there is no match. This would eliminate the need to create many of these redirects manually, including many of the less frequent ones.
Derrick Coetzee 01:27, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I disagree strongly with the notion that redirects that are uncommon mispellings should be deleted. Why?
By its very nature, RfD doesn't get a lot of traffic. Most vandals aren't clever enough to redirect Amazingly fat and stupid dog-faced fart-sniffer to the article on their least favorite person in the world. Let's accept the fact that there's not a whole lot for us to do on RfD, and stop trying to make more work for ourselves. • Benc • 08:14, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Am I right in thinking that a REDIRECT is simply an article which begins #REDIRECT [[somewhere else]] and that any further content is ignored? If so, why not simply add some sort of explanation to a REDIRECT? You could then have something like:
Coblers #REDIRECT [[Cobblers]] Common mis-spelling
which would then show up on a search. HTH HAND -- Phil 09:26, Mar 11, 2004 (UTC)
You mean something like Mediawiki:RedirectAlternateSpelling which could read something like "this is an alternate spelling: do not delete"? -- Phil | Talk 15:47, Mar 12, 2004 (UTC)
I would like to have a policy on the deletion of redirects to nonexistent articles. Some are leftovers from deleted articles, some are redirects made from a template, and some are just the usual bits of anarchism.
In some situations, the redirect and the nonexistent article have similar titles. When one or both of the pages are created at some point in the future, there will be a discussion of if the two are the same thing (and if they're the same, which should hold the article and which should be the redirect). It seems unfair to bias that discussion against the page currently redirecting before either article has been created.
As such, I recommend that all redirects to nonexistent pages be deleted, unless the redirect page has links to it and there already exist a scheme for that redirection (e.g. 2004 Canadian election -> Canadian federal election, 2004 and 1878 Canadian election-> Canadian federal election, 1878). -- Ben Brockert 23:17, May 3, 2004 (UTC)
Shoud archive the debates, and, if yes, where should we keep them? As there isn't just that much we could just create archive pages /Archive1 etc. -- User:Docu
Folks, we have about 90 redirects of the form '"article_name"' - that is, the name of an existing article surrounded by double quotes. Examples include "Desolation_Row", "list_of_slovakian_companies" and "All_My_Trials". I'd like to take a reasonably aggressive approach and delete these where:
I wanted to give folks a few days to think on this and object/comment/offer assistance before I go ahead. - TB 15:47, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
Somebody suggested that the software should provide information on how often a page is accessed, but I think that might have privacy implications and is a bad idea. [originally unsigned by 66.32.123.183 08:47, 16 Aug 2004 ]
Please see User_talk:Sam_Spade#ha ha. User:Zanimum appears to have deleted my Gnome Chompy redirect out of process. Some assistance, please. Sam [ Spade] 10:40, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The point was made to me (and after thinking about it, I concurred) that redirects which are "placeholders" for articles we need, and which are temporarily set to the closest reasonable match (e.g. Sultan of the Ottoman Empire -> Ottoman Empire) should in fact be deleted. That way, we make sure that references to the non-existent article show up in red, so that people know we need to create the page.
It has been suggested that we add this point to the list at WP:RfD#When_should_we_delete_a_redirect, and I think that's a good idea. I'm going to do that "shortly", unless someone has a cogent reason not to (or they have a better reason than the one above as to why we should leave such links :-). Noel 13:47, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The person who deleted that clause cited Wikipedia:Redirects with possibilities as the reason for doing so. I personally don't find the existence of this page a persuasive argument. It's an obscure page, and I doubt most people know about it. Are there really many people who go there, looking for things they have expertise on, that they can write about? And how many topics listed there are not in the expertise of people who do know about it? I think it's much more likely that people stumble across missing articles in the course of their everyday movements around the 'Pedia, and do articles then (just as I did yesterday with DKM Deutschland). So I think the argument that it's better to have red links as a way to get articles written is very persuasive.
Also, if a reader sees a red link, and they want to know more anyway, there's always the "Search" button, so I think the disadvantages of leaving such "close but no cigar" links in place (which is that the article may never get written) far outweighs the advantages (you save somsone having to go use Search). Noel (talk) 00:40, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Sometimes an article is written under an obscure name, and a more appropriately-named page is made a redirect. For example, Group 15 element is a redirect to Pnictogen. The former name is rather unwieldly, but the latter is etymologically questionable (see the article) and not approved by the relevant international standards organization. I want to interchange the article and the redirect, but this requires the redirect to be deleted. Is there a policy on these situations? -- Smack 00:59, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Now that WP:RM seems to be up and running, do we want to alter the header here to refer people to that page for all redirect deletes which are actually for moves? Noel (talk) 00:34, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
There's a possible idea for a bot for adding "missing" redirects that I've added to the Bots page. Since any bad redirects would end up on WP:RFD, I'd really like to get input from you folks on whether it's a worthwhile idea or not. Note also that many of the suggested redirects would be pluralisations (I've heard Noel speak in favour of adding these, and I strongly agree that plurals often make great redirects). All the best, -- Nickj 09:13, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
OK, the idea of automatically adding these by bot is dropped, but the lists have been recreated and tidied up, and placed on this Missing Redirects page, together with instructions. The lists are broken up into blocks of 5 suggestions, so that they are not overwhelming, and so that people can do as much or as little as they like. Additionally, I've added an "Easy Preview" function, so that these can be added in 2 mouse clicks, without typing or copying/pasting anything at all. Hopefully this should provide a good solution of software doing the laborious searching, with humans deciding whether the suggestions are any good or not. All the best, -- Nickj 06:09, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Some of our "reasons to delete/keep" list might need some tweaks. For the "delete" list, my eye catches the following:
Guidelines for redirects says: we try to make sure that all "inbound redirects" are mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs of the article; I'd like to include some sort of reference to this on RfD, and this seems like the right place for it.
This instruction seems to be inconsistent with contemporary practise in many well-accepted cases, e.g. Admin, which redirects to Wikipedia:Administrators, not to mention RfD, which redirect here! See also Talk:VfD and Talk:Vfd, where discussion explicitly is in favour of keeping VfD as a redir to WP:VfD. I don't understand what the dividing line is between x-space redirs to Wikipedia: that we keep, and those we ditch - is it only the most notable ones, or what?
On the "keep" side:
I'd like to expand this to include other forms of speech (e.g. verb tenses and participles, etc); Translating → Translation - is an example.
Do people have any command and/or suggested wordings? Thanks! Noel (talk) 13:34, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
See "When should we delete a redirect?" Wikipedia:Redirect lists a similar list by the same name, but with some minor differences, e.g. Charles/Daniel instead of Adam/Andrew. Is this duplication intentional? Is it a problem? If so, which page should hold the authoritative text? Just wondering. -- Wisq 21:58, 2005 Feb 9 (UTC)
Judging from the HTML comment, someone really wanted to keep the word "automagically" on this page. I removed it because A. The Jargon File article to which the word links contains no mention of the word "automagically"; and B. The Jargon File site itself [4] is not very user-friendly when it comes to looking up individual definitions. So I'm not sure of the point of including the word as a link to Jargon file when the target article is not really helpful.
If that person is still really attached to leaving the term "automagically" on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion, then I suggest either A. Linking the word directly to the external jargon file definition like so: Automagically, or B. just put the word in quotes. I think having the word here is silly, which is why I removed it rather than doing one of the above two things. Taco Deposit | Talk-o to Taco 15:23, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
There are two kinds of redirect pages I think should be deleted, but they are not mentioned in the list:
The term
biped forms - like most English words - the plural by adding "s". Someone (who presumably wasn't aware we can create links like "[[biped]]s") created a page
bipeds. This page was listed on
User:Nickj/Redirects/redirects-066.txt as requiring attention. To avoid this sort of distraction, wouldn't it be good if we deleted all such pages?
Sebastian 05:45, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)
The page
aggridant redirects to
Abraham Maslow, who coined the term and was apparently the only significant person to ever use it. The term is not discussed on that page. It was briefly mentioned, but not really defined, there temporarily, but that mention got deleted on January 1, 2005. Obviously, since its creatin in 2003 nobody felt that this article was worth even a definition of the term. I think it would be better to delete such redirects, because they mislead readers.
Sebastian 05:45, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)
The GFDL requires Wikipedia to credit authors. Wikipedia does this by preserving the history of articles. But it cannot do this if the article is deleted. What sometines happens is that articles are merged, and one is turned into a redirect to the other. That is fine, though the edit summary on the new longer article should say that is what has happened. The problem comes if the redirect is then deleted, because the history of the source of some of the information is lost. -- Henrygb 21:25, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
We recently came across some very strangely named articles on WP:VFD (one with a 200-char title, another with ellipsis in it). Would it be useful to do some automated searches on cases like these, and nominate them here as inappropriate?
Radiant _* 14:27, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)
I've reverted an apparently un-discussed change to case #6 of "when should we delete a redirect", as well as minor changes to a number of other parts of the policy. The old version (now restored) was:
Michael Hardy's version is
Was there a discussion of this I somehow missed? -- Carnildo 04:58, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
In view of the list of exceptions in the paragraph beginning with "However...", I've revised item 6 in a way that is really just a changed in emphasis and I hope will avoid some rash deletions-without-due-deliberation. It now reads as follows:
Michael Hardy 03:40, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Here's the quote from Wikipedia:Redirects_for_deletion:
....
That's been there all along. Michael Hardy 00:49, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
And you have been saying that redirects from plurals and alternative spellings to singulars or more standard or less confusing or otherwise better spellings should be considered "broken" unless the target page already exists. Obviously a redirect from an incorrect spelling or a misnomer or a plural to a correct article title, which does not yet exist, can avoid later creation of duplicate articles! And that's what that long-standing policy says: we should not speedily delete a redirect to a non-existent target if it may help avoid later inadvertent creation of duplicate articles. Why are you so stronly opposed to such a simple precaution against inadvertent creation of duplicate articles, whose authors cannot work together because they are unaware of each other? Michael Hardy 02:45, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I keep getting asked about these, so I'm going to post this here for general interest. (Like I have said several times, policy at the moment is to keep them, but I wouldn't mind seeing this changed, and these old names deleted, but I'm happy to keep them too.)
I wasn't around for the "keep sub-page redirects" discussion, it was before my time; it happened back when they decided to get rid of sub-pages. I added keep #7 when I was told of the policy by some other admins (when a case came up - I think it may have been Cambodia sub-pages, IIRC). I spent some time researching where the relevant policy is, and also spent a while looking for discussion about redirects at the location of old sub-pages.
You can find the policy at Wikipedia:Redirect#Renamings and merges. That text was added in this series of edits by User:MyRedDice, back in the summer of 2003.
Although I found a lot of debate about sub-pages, and some about keeping redirects to pages that were moved, I didn't find much specifically about the keeping of redirects to subpages. (It may have been discussed as part of a discussion on RfD about a specific entry, but if so I don't know which one; I looked in WP:Rfd/Precedents and didn't see anything.) There was general discussion of keeping URL's which used to work for a page continue to work, so that links to Wikipedia pages stored off-site continue to work, and that seems to have been applied to sub-pages.
PS: Here's the removal of the case which prompted me to add that entry to the keep list. Note that there's no discussion of the policy here; both of us just seem to accept it. Noel (talk) 14:07, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
For those interested in this history of how sub-pages were eventually discarded as an organizational scheme (which happened around the start of 2002, as best I can make out), see this page. If anyone knows of a better reference on the topic, please add it. Noel (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
In the list I found an interesting item: Ted Koppel (alum), which redirects to Ted Koppel, always has, and is not linked to from anywhere but here. In other words, it's a nonsensical redirect because nobody on Earth is going to try to look up Ted Koppel (alum) instead of just going to Ted Koppel. Is it permissible to speedy when there is absolutely no reason whatever for this kind of "disambiguation"? - furrykef ( Talk at me) 08:18, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've been seeing a lot of instances recently where people turn articles into redirects, and promptly list the redirects here. To me, this feels like an end-run around the way we normally delete content pages through the VfD process. Unless someone objects, I propose to modify the instructions here to say that in such cases, the original content will be restored, and the request removed from RfD, without further notice. Noel (talk) 04:00, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
CamelCase redirects have been the subject of debate as to whether or not we should continue to keep them. This poll is an attempt to see if we should change the current policy for dealing with them.
CamelCase redirects are a relic of the early days of Wikipedia, when CamelCase the only syntax whereby links from one article to another could be done (see Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia for more). For single-word article titles, capitalization of the last character was the standard arrived at. Support of the Free Link syntax for links ([[target article]]) only arrived in February 2001, and articles were rapidly renamed from CamelCase names to regular names, leaving redirects behind.
The current policy (see WP:RfD#Keep #4) is to keep them (to prevent links, bookmarks, etc to them outside Wikipedia working). You can see more about how (and why) that came to be at #Sub-page redirects above (sub-page and CamelCase redirects were dealt with in the same way, so all comments applying to one apply to the other); Talk:ModulE also contains a discussion of the issue. Noel 16:36, 27 July 2005
OK, this has been running for about 3 weeks now - long enough to get a sense of the community - which is that the community is pretty evenly split (it's 11-11 at this point in time) on whether to keep them or delete them. Since there's no consensus to delete, they stay. Noel (talk) 02:06, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Stub templates redirects to Wikipedia namespace, but it saves people from typing a lot of text. Delete or keep? — Stevey7788 ( talk) 21:19, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
By the above poll, it seems obvious there is no consensus for automatically keeping any CamelcAse redirects simply because they're historical. This doesn't mean that they should all be deleted, but at least they should be judged on their own merits. R adiant _>|< 10:07, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
I started the poll (sorry for not signing to make it clear that I did it, I have fixed that) in the common meaning "a mechanism to gauge community feeling" - i.e. to see whether people agreed with the policy, or not. It is not a vote. In retrospect, it could have been slightly better organized (with a "case-by-case decision" section), but since this was really just an attempt to figure out if there was fairly good community consensus behind any particular approach, it's good enough; one can read the comments and get a sense of what the community wants. Noel (talk) 15:07, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
I was the newbie who thought, when looking for my home country, and seeing FinlanD first in the list of suggested pages: "This looks so stupid - can't anything be done about a typo like that?" Only after finding out what CamelCase really was, did I understand. So, a question: Is there any way to automatically remove CamelCase from the search results, not the actual articles or redirects? For instance, should redirects be included in search result at all? (Still relatively newbie, I suspect that may be a dumb question, so please don't snarl... ;-) -- Janke | Talk 14:27, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
{{ WP:RFD}}
Why is this page backwards? Just about every other process page lists new entries on top. R adiant _>|< 13:11, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
Exactly why do we delete non-English redirectors, as they seem to be a perfectly valid navigation aid. IT also allows people to find things if they don't know the proper English term for something they know in the subject's primary language, or in their own mother-tongue. 132.205.45.110 19:07, 8 September 2005 (UTC)